Girls (Photo: Sylvia Sewell)

This past Friday, Bowery Ballroom featured Girls and Real Estate, two of 2009’s critical darlings, and both practitioners of the current psych-pop du jour. Here’s a report from the front lines.

Opener Tough Knuckles came off like a dollar-store version of the other acts. The singer hid a lack of any real melody or vocal skill behind a wall of reverb and name-dropped “the beach” between songs as if it were a celebrity. I’m still puzzled as to how sloppily played garage-rock tropes and meaningless lyrics about beaches are suddenly appealing to so many people.

Up next was Real Estate. These dudes actually have songs for miles and proved it with a bubbly selection of tracks from their upcoming debut. “Suburban Dogs” came off the best, mixing beautifully hazed guitar interplay with laid-back thudding rhythms. Other songs, like “Beach Comber” and “Green River,” ramped up the glistening psych-pop formula and made me nostalgic for Pavement. Basically, if you’ve ever spent an afternoon eating strawberries off your stomach while on mushrooms, you’ll enjoy the Real Estate live experience.

Around 11:15pm, Girls hit the stage to strong displays of fandom. Although it’s clear why people like this band, I still imagine that somebody somewhere paid someone to make them popular. There’s really nothing unique or notable going on with Girls besides a grabby backstory and the music video they made that fooled people into watching gay porn.

Nonetheless, Christopher Owen—the band’s singer and songwriter—captivated the sold-out crowd with a sound akin to an ideal Best of Baby Boomer Rock box set. Tracks like “Ghost Mouth” and “Laura” blended seamlessly together, an obvious pastiche of older pop-rock records (think Elvis Costello or Buddy Holly) that we’ve been pushed throughout our lives. The songs are pleasant enough, but were rendered lifeless on the Bowery’s stage when compared with Album, the band’s debut.—Carter Maness